How Commerce Reordered Power, 1648 to 1763

The idea

The exam's second band asks how the global economy and the great powers of the eighteenth century fit together, and the anchor's answer is that commerce made the powers and the powers made the commerce. The theory came first. Nobles of the sword and robe lived on land and despised merchants, and mercantilism gave their contempt a doctrine: wealth was a fixed pie of land and bullion, so the state's task was to capture colonies, run surpluses and exclude rivals. Inside that doctrine a different practice grew. The Dutch chartered a company in sixteen-oh-two whose stockholders reinvested profit for more profit, took Indonesia by force and law, paid thirty percent dividends by the anchor's count, and by sixteen twenty owned half of Europe's merchant ships. The Dutch invented the exchange, the bubble and the habit of treating wealth as something the state should protect, and every king who could copied them. Britain copied best: a Dutch-trained treasury in sixteen sixty-seven, Navigation Acts from sixteen fifty-one reserving colonial trade to English ships, three Dutch wars won at sea, New Amsterdam renamed New York. The prize of all this was sugar, and sugar's price was the Atlantic slave trade: a triangle of manufactures, captives and crops, a Middle Passage whose mortality was calculated into profit, and a count the anchor puts at twelve to fifteen million people, over ninety percent of them to the Caribbean and Brazil, with the anchor's claim, attributed, that racial slavery was born here. The same companies reached Asia. The English East India Company traded from factories until Plassey in seventeen fifty-seven gave it Bengal and Bengal's taxes gave it armies. At home the society these empires served stayed a society of orders, clergy, nobility and everyone else, with nobles taxed little and hunting where peasants starved, the commons enclosed, serfs sold by the soul in the east, and a bourgeoisie rich, educated and excluded. Five great powers jockeyed over it all, and the Seven Years' War of seventeen fifty-six to sixty-three settled the commercial question: France lost Canada and India, Britain took the oceans, and the war's bills started the revolutions that unit 07 opens with.